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Regulation

The FCC recently released hundreds of pages of their two-year long review of US media. It amounts to the most substantial overview in decades.

If you have not heard about it, you already understand some of the problems but including a focal point of the report, the increasingly neglected coverage of local news by an ever concentrated cadre of media owners.

The report is quite a tome at 360 pages. Because I'm still absorbing it, myself, in lieu of coverage, I'll refer you to "On The Media" audio reporting of the FCC's analysis, below, and the working group's index page for downloading "The Information Needs of Communities" in MS WOrd, PDF, or text format.

From the start it's been embarrassingly clear that BP has alot invested...in America. But at least with the election of Obama to the White House, I had assumed that one or two small changes might be realized.

For example, one of the defining issues of the Bush Administration came from big, litigation-averse industry putting his team in charge of the DOJ and appointing corporate activists to the Supreme Court.

I don't have any independent assessment of the conditions from which this email was supposed to have been taken.

But it's a repost of the complete email reportedly picked up by The Reformed Broker, Joshua Brown. It does sound like a "hideous little piece of class warfare," or what many pissed-off Americans would like to think they'd hear coming from a 'vulture capitalist'.

Hydraulic fracturing should be regulated under the
Safe Drinking Water Act

Only one industry in the U. S. can legally inject known toxins directly into sources of drinking water without federal regulation, but as early as this week, legislation may be introduced in Congress to overturn the exemption granted to Big Oil by the 2005 Congress at the urging of Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO

Hydraulic fracturing (FRACKing) is a technique that was developed by Halliburton. Millions of gallons of fresh water, mixed with sand, and often containing a witch’s brew of cancer-causing and toxic chemicals are injected under high pressure miles down the drilling hole to fracture the underground formation and release the oil and gas trapped within. Ninety percent of all U.S. oil and gas wells undergo hydraulic fracturing to stimulate the production of oil and gas.

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — State officials are seeking $36.2 million in damages from OppenheimerFunds Inc., which managed a fund responsible for steep losses in the Oregon College Savings Plan. Officials said in a statement Monday that risky, "hedge-fund like" investments cost the Oppenheimer Core Bond Fund 36 percent of its value last year — and 10 percent more so far this year.

Elizabeth Warren was appointed chair of a newly created Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which is charged with keeping tabs on the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector - including Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Warren however, has had some "Trouble" getting straight forward answers ... as she explained to the Boston Globe:

Elizabeth Warren: There's a major problem and a minor problem. The minor problem is documentation. I've spent four weeks now looking for someone who can give me the details of the stress test so that we can do an independent evaluation of whether the stress test is any good.

We get: "someone will call [you] right back." Only the call doesn't come. The major problem is ...

While we'll take Any In Depth Reports about what already should have been common knowledge on Post Traumatic Stress I do have just a couple of minor irritations with an otherwise Stellar Report on the Treatments for PTSD in the Washington Times edition today. let me get them out of the way.

Current law requires hospitals to satisfy the community benefit standard in order to qualify as tax-exempt charities under section 501(c)(3). The Hospital Compliance Project (the Project) was initiated in 2006 by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to study nonprofit hospitals and community benefit, as well as to determine how hospitals establish and report executive compensation. [IRS: Hospitals and Community Benefit - Interim Report (30 Jul '07)]

In the late '50's the criteria for maintaining tax exempt status included a requirement that hospitals serve any patient coming through the emergency room doors. Over the course of the past roughly 50 years that requirement has been steadily chipped away, leading hospitals to charges and counter-charges of - among other things - "patient dumping". From Atlanta:

"These other hospitals are [nonprofit] tax-exempt organizations, and both the state and federal government are giving them tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks,” he said. He declined to identify any hospital.

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S.
...

in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.